The Red Notebook by Antoine Laurain

gilder?’
    ‘She adds gold decoration to things, gold leaf on frames, and monuments.’
    ‘Too cool!’ Chloé said enthusiastically. ‘Wait, they’re calling me. I’ll have to go. Tell me all about it over dinner on Thursday,’ and she promptly hung up.
    When Laurent went home his apartment struck him as empty and silent in a way he had never felt before.

     
     
    The second evening he again poured himself a Jack Daniel’s and lit the fire. William rang, as they had agreed, on Laure’s landline ‘at cat time’. When he asked if Laurent had been to see her, Laurent had replied: ‘Yes’. This time the question had obliged him to move to the next level, that of the outright lie. Then Laurent had settled down on the sofa and the cat had installed itself on his lap and started to purr as he stroked it gently. He told himself that this could not go on, that he had crossed the line some time ago. From having performed a fine act of citizenship (as the police put it), he was now sitting by Laure’s open fire, which effectively made him guilty of breaking and entering. His amateur investigation had worked like a dream and when it came to an end – which it inevitably would – he would wonder whether these past few days had actually happened. For now, he felt reassured by the unfamiliar decor with its soft lighting and had no desire to return home. He had not experienced such a sense of peace for many years; time seemed to have been reduced to the rhythm of the crackling fire. Just as he was falling asleep he persuaded himself that he could spend the rest of his days here on this sofa, a black cat asleep on his lap, waiting for an unknown woman to wake up and return.
    He found himself on the terrace of the tower at La Défense. It was a bad dream that recurred every two or three years. Adream that wasn’t exactly a dream. The terrace must still exist. It was from another life. A life in which he was Laurent Letellier – wealth adviser – private banking. A life which had ended on the thirty-fourth floor of a tower in a business district, one summer afternoon at the end of the twentieth century. After a long meeting, everyone had been drinking coffee in the sunshine of the tower’s terrace café. His colleagues had taken off their jackets and loosened their ties; some had even put on sunglasses. Laurent left the group and went over to the steel guard-rail. He looked down at the figures in the square below, preceded at that hour by enormously elongated shadows. Some were moving slowly, others trotting briskly like ants – surely towards a meeting which they must not be late for. The air was burning his skin, the tower blocks bright in the sun and sharp like quartz rising from the earth. He lowered his head towards the 140 metres of emptiness. He thought it would only take a few seconds. His colleagues would be stupefied; some would drop their coffee cups, others would open their mouths wide without emitting any sound. He would leave behind the young woman he had just met, Claire; she would remake her life with someone better than him. Many years later she would remember that sad relationship she had started with the boy who had killed himself without leaving a letter of explanation.
    An existence devoted to reading would have been his ultimate fulfilment, but it had not been given to him. He would have had to choose that path much earlier, to have known what he wanted to do straight after the baccalauréat. To have had a life plan. Laurent had let himself be drawn into studying law, which had led to the bank. At first it had been interesting to be recognised as a promising young banker, to climb the hierarchy, to have responsibilities and to earn a lot of money. Up until the day hehad started to feel, dimly at first, then more and more clearly, that the man he had become was the absolute opposite of what he really was. Although the dichotomy weighed heavily on him, for a while the money he was earning was